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My Raspberry Pi 4 BOM for ESXi-Arm Fling

10/07/2020 by William Lam 11 Comments

With the release of the highly anticipated ESXi-Arm Fling, I thought it would be useful to share my hardware build-of-materials that I am currently using with ESXi-Arm Fling, especially as folks have been asking about what is possible or things to be aware of before purchasing a Raspberry Pi.

I do want to stress that the components listed below is just one of many options, it is highly recommend folks carefully review the ESXi-Arm Fling documentation to understand which accessories are supported along with some of their constraints prior to making a purchase.


Devices from Left to Right:

[Read more...] about My Raspberry Pi 4 BOM for ESXi-Arm Fling

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Filed Under: ESXi-Arm, vSphere Tagged With: Arm, esxi, Raspberry Pi

ESXi on Arm Fling is LIVE!

10/06/2020 by William Lam 15 Comments


The highly anticipated ESXi on Arm Fling has just been announced and is NOW generally available as a new VMware Fling! Head over to https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition and be sure to carefully read through the Requirements and documentation before try out the bits.

History

Although ESXi-Arm was publicly demo'ed at VMworld Europe 2018 during the closing keynote by Ray O'Farrell (former CTO of VMware), the reality was there was a ton more to do before ESXi-Arm could be a reality for VMware customers. The newly formed ESXi-Arm team at VMware has been hard at work these last couple of years working with both Arm and its eco-system in extending hardware standards, firmware standards (open contribution to UEFI), and certification beyond the existing Arm server ecosystem, which enabled us to support platforms like SmartNICs and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. This is just a glimpse into what it took to get where we are at today.

I am also excited to share that theย Virtually Speaking Podcast crew has invited us back for an exclusive episode featuring both Andrei Warkentin and myself to dive deeper into the development of ESXi-Arm project at VMware. This is an episode you will not want to miss!

Hardware

The ESXi-Arm Fling supports a number of different Arm platforms ranging from a traditional Datacenter form-factor to both Near and Far Edge systems including the highly requested Raspberry Pi (rPI)! With the rPI, only the 4b model will be supported and although both the 4GB and 8GB memory model works with ESXi-Arm. We highly recommend folks invest in the 8GB model to be able to take advantage of more vSphere features and be able to run more workloads.


For a complete list of supported Arm hardware platforms, please refer to the Requirements section of the Fling website. If there are other platforms you would like to see get added, do not hesitate to either leave a comment here and/or post directly on the ESXi-Arm Fling page.

vCenter Support

For customers with an existing x86 vCenter Server or those that would like to deploy a new vCenter Server, you will be able to attach and manage ESXi-Arm hosts just like you normally would as long as you are using vCenter Server 7.0 or greater.


We expect the majority of vSphere platform features to "just work" like vMotion but there may be some features that may not work or have additional requirements.


For example, to enable vSphere HA and/or vSphere FT, the Fault Domain Manager (FDM) Client VIB must be installed on an ESXi-Arm host. Today, this VIB is distributed as part of vCenter Server and only x86 version of the client is available. We do provide FDM Client VIBs for ESXi-Arm as part of the ESXi-Arm Fling, but support will be limited to vCenter Server 7.0c and 7.0d. For detailed instructions, please refer to the ESXi-Arm documentation.

VMware Tools

VMware Tools for ESXi-Arm GuestOS is not bundled as part of ESXi-Arm Fling, but can be installed. To do so, you will need to compile open-vm-tools for your respective GuestOS. Instructions can be found in the ESXi-Arm Fling documentation and below, you can see a screenshot of VMware Tools for Arm successfully running on Ubuntu 20.04 GuestOS running on ESXi-Arm on the rPI 4.

vSAN Witness

Lastly, a popular use case that has been brought up when ESXi-Arm was initially demo'ed was the use of the rPI as an inexpensive vSAN Witness, which is a fantastic use case for ROBO & Edge locations. I am very happy to share that using an rPI 8GB as a vSAN Witness works!ย As you can see from the screenshot below, I have two physical Intel NUC 9th Pro configured in a 2-Node vSAN Cluster and I am using the rPI as vSAN Witness ๐Ÿ˜€


In case this was not clear, this is NOT officially supported but it does demonstrate the viability of this concept and and feedback from the our users would help drive the priority and the potential support for such a configuration. More details will be shared in a future blog post outlining the instructions on using rPI as vSAN Witness. Stay tuned!

As you can see, this is just a small taste of what can be done with the ESXi-Arm Fling and the possibilities are truly endless! The ESXi-Arm team is very excited to see what the community will do with the ESXi-Arm Fling, what type of use cases are you solving or workloads that you are running. Below are a few ways in how you can engage with the ESXi-Arm team and community.

ESXi-Arm Engagement

  • For general questions/issues, please leave a Comment and/or file Bug on the ESXi-Arm Fling site
  • Follow ESXi-Arm on Twitter: @esxi_arm
  • Follow the official ESXi-Arm Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/arm
  • Chat with the ESXi-Arm team and community on Slack: #esxi-arm-flingย onย VMware {code}
  • For other inquiries or engaging with ESXi on ARM Product Team, you can send an email to esxionarm [at] vmware [dot] com
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Filed Under: ESXi-Arm, VSAN, vSphere Tagged With: Arm, esxi, Raspberry Pi, witness

PowerCLI Module for managing vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO)

10/05/2020 by William Lam 7 Comments

A few years back I had submitted a PowerCLI Feature Request (PCLI-44) via the public PowerCLI Ideas platform requesting for a PowerCLI module that would support vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) Administrative functionality such as managing SSO Users, Groups, Password, Lockout Policy and Identity Sources.


This was one of the most popular Idea voted by the PowerCLI community, which also stressed the need for such functionality which I came across on a regular basis on some of the Automation I was writing. In the past, I have written numerous blog articles in working around this limitation as the vCenter SSO Admin APIs were not and leveraging Guest Operations API, one could still automate various SSO operations using the various SSO CLIs that is included within the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).

Today, I received a notification from the PowerCLI Ideas platform that this feature as "Shipped" and it looks like the PowerCLI team has just released an Open Source Module called VMware.vSphere.SsoAdmin that includes the following 12 cmdlets:

  • Add-ActiveDirectoryIdentitySource
  • Connect-SsoAdminServer
  • Disconnect-SsoAdminServer
  • Get-SsoGroup
  • Get-SsoLockoutPolicy
  • Get-SsoPasswordPolicy
  • Get-SsoPersonUser
  • Get-SsoTokenLifetime
  • New-SsoPersonUser
  • Remove-SsoPersonUser
  • Set-SsoLockoutPolicy
  • Set-SsoPasswordPolicy
  • Set-SsoPersonUser
  • Set-SsoTokenLifetime

To get started with the new PowerCLI SSO Module, take a look at the instructions below.

[Read more...] about PowerCLI Module for managing vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO)

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Filed Under: Automation, PowerCLI, vSphere Tagged With: PowerCLI, sso

Full OVA/OVF property support coming to Terraform provider for vSphere

06/11/2020 by William Lam 10 Comments

Terraform is one of the most popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool out there today and it should come as no surprise there is Terraform provider for vSphere which many of our customers have been using. In fact, VMware just recently released a couple more new providers (here and here) supporting VMware Cloud on AWS and NSX-T solutions respectively.

Although I have used Terraform and the vSphere provider in the past, it has not been my tool of choice for automation as it still lacks a number of basic vSphere capabilities which I require on a regular basis. The most common one being the ability to deploy a Virtual Appliance (OVA/OVF) which has been my biggest barrier and I know this has been a highly requested feature from the community as well.

In early May of this year, I noticed that v1.18 of the vSphere provider finally added support for OVA/OVF deployment and I was pretty excited to give this a try and may even have been the first to kick the tires on this feature? Although OVA/OVF support was added, it looks like support for customizing OVF properties which is commonly included as part of an OVA/OVF would only possible if you are cloning from an existing imported OVA/OVF image. One of the most common use case is to import an OVF/OVA from either your local computer or from a URL and it looks like this use case was not possible.

I filed two Github issues, one for supporting OVF properties for initial OVA/OVF deployment and another regarding a bug I ran into when importing OVA/OVF from a remote URL. Just yesterday, I got the good news that my feature request has been completed and I was given an early drop of the vSphere provider to try out this feature. I may have also hinted to the Engineering team to use my popular Nested ESXi Appliance OVA as a reference test implementation as I knew this was something many customers will want to deploy ๐Ÿ™‚

UPDATE (06/23/20) - Support for OVA/OVF properties is now available as part of 1.20 of the Terraform Provider for vSphere

[Read more...] about Full OVA/OVF property support coming to Terraform provider for vSphere

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Filed Under: Automation, vSphere Tagged With: ova, ovf, Terraform

New VEBA release, new website and new mascot!

05/12/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Today I am very happy to share a number of updates with the community regarding the popular VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. Each release has always been a team effort, but but I am especially proud of this release as it demonstrates how large the team has grown in the past 6 months and their impactful contributions to this solution to help our VMware customers and partners. Michael and I could not be more prouder and the feedback both internally and externally has been nothing but amazing and we are just getting started when it comes to event-driven automation for the SDDC!ย 

New VEBA Release

Here are some of the key features in our latest v0.4 release. If you wish to see a detailed change log, please refer to the VEBA github releases page.

  • New VEBA Direct Console UI (DCUI)
  • New Incident Management example functions
  • New Golang example function
  • Deploy VEBA to a existing Kubernetes Cluster (documentation)
  • Updated VEBA base OS to latest Photon OS 3.0 Rev2
  • Replace Weave with Antrea CNI
  • Support customization of Docker bridge network (default: 172.17.0.1/16) via OVF property
  • Monitor VEBA Appliance using vRealize Operations (documentation)

Below are two features that I think is worth highlighting:

Thanks to Frankie Gold, we now have a slick new VEBA DCUI which replaces the old static /etc/issue entry which was only updated once after a successful deployment. If you decided to change the hostname, these changes would not be reflected. The new VEBA DCUI is dynamic and will display the latest configuration from the system including the configured system resources. In addition, it also uses the new /etc/veba-release file found within VEBA appliance which provides information about the version of VEBA, commit ID along with the event processor that was configured.


As part of the DCUI development planning, I was reminded of this fun little VMware Easter Egg. I thought it would be fun to include a few of our own and also give a nod back to this old school easter egg which sadly is no longer in the product. The default color scheme is green (cyan) and if you go into the VM Console and type "veba", you will activate an alternate color scheme as shown in the screenshot below. To return to the original color scheme, just type "veba" again to deactivate.


There is actually a couple more interesting ๐Ÿฃeaster eggs which I had asked Frankie to include ... I wonder who will be the first to find and share them? Maybe the first few folks who share details about the easter egg on it Twitter will get one of the new VEBA sticker!

UPDATE (05/13/20) - Congrats to Allan Kjaer on finding the first VEBA DCUI Easter Egg #1 which is typing the word "pride" (this is a nod back to the original easter egg found in Fusion, see reference above)

Congrats to @Allan_Kjaer on finding the first hidden ๐Ÿฃ#EasterEgg in latest #VEBA release. Type โ€œprideโ€ to activate/deactivate new color scheme

Very impressive Allan, as I thought this would have taken longer & was a nice nod to original @VMwareFusion Easter Egg ๐Ÿ˜Š pic.twitter.com/d06skOglj5

— William Lam (@lamw) May 13, 2020

Congrats David Bibby on finding the second and final VEBA DCUI Easter Egg #2 which is typing the word "otto" (name of VEBA's mascot) which will activate VEBA DCUI console with rendering of Otto ๐Ÿ™‚ To deactivate and return to the default screen, simply type "otto" again.

Congrats @bib_ds on finding the last and final #VEBA #EasterEgg which is dedicated to our new mascot #OttoTheOrca

Iโ€™m sure colleagues will take a second look when they see ๐Ÿณ in the VM Summary page ๐Ÿ˜‰ https://t.co/JaDUFkQ7fi

— William Lam (@lamw) May 13, 2020

[Read more...] about New VEBA release, new website and new mascot!

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Filed Under: Automation, vSphere Tagged With: vcenter event broker appliance, VEBA

Virtually Speaking Podcast: MacOS Virtualization and MacStadium

05/11/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Last week I had the pleasure to be on the Virtually Speaking Podcast (#1 Virtualization Podcast) to talk a little about the history and the use cases driving MacOS Virtualization in the Enterprise. In fact, this affects most if not every single organization that develops either an Apple MacOS and/or iOS application which includes VMware.

We also had a very special guest, Preston Lasebikan, a Systems Architect for MacStadium who gave us some insights into how they are supporting major Enterprise customers such as Dropbox, Capital One, Shopify, Box and many others using their Apple Mac Infrastructure which runs on VMware vSphere. If you never heard of MacStadium before, they are the largest service provider of Apple Mac Infrastructure as a Service in the world and there is a high probability your organization is already using them with you even knowing.

Click on the image below to listen ๐Ÿ‘‡

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Filed Under: Apple, ESXi, vSphere Tagged With: apple, mac mini, mac pro, macOS, vSphere

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Services Business Unit (CSBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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